this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 16 June 2024 (awful.systems)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Need to make a primal scream without gathering footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

iterm2 update, moving the shit out of the core application (like it probably should've been in the first place):

3.5.1

This release adds some safety valves to eliminate
the risk of private information leaving the
terminal via the AI endpoints. While an API key
and explicit user action were always needed to use
AI features, some users asked for an impenetrable
firewall for safety and regulatory purposes.

To that end, there are three relevant changes:

1. Code that communicates with AI providers such
as OpenAI has been moved into a plugin that you
must install separately. Enterprise system admins
can block bundle id com.googlecode.iterm2.iTermAI
to prevent it from being installed in the first
place.

See here for details:
https://iterm2.com/ai-plugin.html

2. In addition, you must manually enable AI
features in Settings. Doing so requires admin
access.

3. Enterprise administrators who wish to disable
iTerm2's AI access may set the user default
GenerativeAIAllowed to False in their MDM systems.

still never received a reply email from the author to my mail. wonder what they think/have learned of this experience tho

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I'm afraid their character has been exposed

I uninstalled when they announced it but this week's news says it's time to uninstall macos too

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (2 children)

For the moment, I’m choosing to believe the following: 1) that itermdev was operating under hyped-engineer mode and choosing cluelessly as a result (and I sorely hope they learned something through this), 2) that Apple is too selfish to go hard on openai (because it means less money for them)

#2 I’m a smidge more certain about

But both of them are deeply “ugh, fuck” kinda feelings for me.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You're probably right. I have just lost patience and trust for software in general.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

I hear ya.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

I haven't seen the details but apparently Apple may not be paying OpenAI for the ChatGPT functionality. So macOS may not be using ChatGPT heavily.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I seem to remember iTerm doing something weird about 10 years ago, like adding telemetry, but I can’t find it…

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

iTerm2's leak issue was first discovered ten months ago. iTerm2's creator initially reacted by adding an option to iTerm 3.0.13 that allowed users to disable DNS lookups. The feature remained turned on by default for new and existing installations.

jfc

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

to get on my soapbox for a moment: iterm2 is in objc, which still has a lot of the ancillary problems that C has. testing properly is one of them - I can easily see such kind of fuckups slipping past by simple virtue of human error, possibly helped along by shitty tools/choices[0]. for example, I know of nothing in C-land that enables property-based testing, and from a quick check it seems that XCTest also runs on the human-enumerated-tests philosophy. so if no-one writes the test that'll catch it, it could at best be caught by accident (through something else maybe triggering it).

and people are also really fucking bad at thinking in/about side effects. even a lot of systems thinkers seem to fuck that up.

/soapbox

[0] - I was recently debugging why a particular piece of Go software wasn't outputting anything I was expecting at the log level I had it set. quickly went to its repo, glanced at the code just to check if my expectation was right, then popped a message to a friend who deals with more Go than I do (which is near-nil, because it is a GARBAGE FUCKING LANGUAGE OF AND CAUSING NIGHTMARES, gah). he reminded me of the fact that Go had fairly recently fixed a bug in its stdlib logging library that had fucked up which levels it would handle things, due to an error in the fucking switch statement. for the stdlib goddamn logger. a bug which had been there for over 2y iirc.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Yeah, I that’s probably what I was thinking of.